Gaming Age is reporting that the recent rumors of a PS3 announcement on March 15th are true. Joystiq and others have already reported this. So, is it really going to happen? What are they going to announce?

Here is a short recap of the various PS3 rumors and their probability of being confirmed:

Playstation 3 Delay - Will the PS3 hit it’s supposed spring launch date? I really doubt it. At this point everybody is expecting a delay. Nobody really knows when the PS3 will be shipping and thus no stores are taking pre-orders yet. It’s most likely that the PS3 won’t hit the US until November. Perhaps it will show up in Japan as early as this summer, but don’t count on it.

New PS3 Controller - Everybody seemed to hate the original boomerang design even more than the Spiderman PS3 font. If they are going to unveil a new controller now would be the time, so it could very possibly happen. However, don’t expect it to look like the dualshock. They already got into hot water with that controller design once.

PS3 Online Service - I expect this to happen at some point, but don’t expect it to be annouced until E3. If they are building anything, then it’s probably going to be more media-centric than game centric. It’s going to disappoint a lot of people. It won’t be an Xbox Live killer by any means.

iTunes PS3? - As unlikely as this probably is, it also makes a whole lot of sense. If Sony would ditch their whole Sony Connect and latch on to the iTunes user base of millions of people, they might have the next generation’s “killer app”. However, the one thing Sony wants more than money right now is control, and without the ability to control the iTunes format, they won’t ever go for it.

So there you have it. Any other PS3 predictions?

It seems that we are hearing about high definition everything these days. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are both launching this year and every major media company is really starting to push the high-def revolution. This year might be the year when enough devices take advantage of HD and enough HDTV’s are within the budget of most consumers. However, is it really all wine and roses for this forthcoming technology advance?

In a word, no. The dirty little secret of this push to high-definition is really a push to DRM and closing the so called “analog hole”. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are going to use a content protection scheme that degrades the quality of the so called “high definition” movies to something much closer to DVD quality if you aren’t using a HDCP enabled connection to your television. Now, if we all owned HDCP enabled HDTV’s this wouldn’t be a problem. However, most of the HDTV’s sold in the last 5 years DON’T have HDCP enabled HDMI(or DVI) connections. What’s worse is that many HDTV’s being bought by consumers today still don’t have HDCP and thus the shiny new Blu-ray and HD-DVD’s they are going to be buying in the next year aren’t going to even show up in high-definition.

So, what is the movie industry going to do about this? Well, they are going to try to not really tell anyone until it’s too late, which I think is a mistake. You don’t hear Sony talking about how Blu-ray isn’t going to be high-definition on most televisions, instead they keep refering to it as “true high-definition”. However, it wouldn’t be fair to point the finger squarely at Sony. Toshiba and others aren’t doing much better to educate consumers about what is really going to be required to experience this high-definition revolution.

Ironically, the only comapnies that seem to realize that most HDTV’s don’t support HDMI/HDCP are the cable/sattelite television companies and Microsoft. Despite the seemingly constant evil of Microsoft, they have actually came out as pro-consumer in the high-def debate. They at least recognized that most HDTV’s use component inputs for their high-definition input when they built the Xbox 360. I for one thought that was a very intelligent decision. My only hope now is that the HD-DVD addon drive for the Xbox 360 somehow bypasses the content protection and allows the watching of HD-DVD in 1080i or 720p. Otherwise, the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle is going to end up being one of the biggest wastes of consumer dollars ever and the winner is not going to be either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. The winner is going to be the cable and sattelite comapanies that offer video-on-demand or perhaps a video download service such as iTunes offering movies in HD.

It’s the morning of the next great Apple announcement. What should we expect to see today? Video iPod? MacBook(iBook)? MacMini? iTablet? Well, all of those are great possibilities, but are they fun enough? A couple of them are, but as the mole I try to look deeper into the conspiracy theory to find the hard(ly) published rumors that slip through the cracks of most journalistic efforts.

So what could it be? Don’t be surprised if we see iTunes show up on the PS3 or the Xbox 360. Both systems are extremely media-centric and want to be the center of your digital life in the same way that the iPod and iTunes already are. Now, since Apple has partnerships with both Sony and Microsoft for various things, either company could have made a deal with Apple to get iTunes on their system. However, it’s more likely that we would see iTunes on the Xbox 360 for two reasons. One, it’s already on the market. Two, Apple owes Microsoft big. It wasn’t too many years ago that Microsoft gave Apple the cash infusion that it needed to stay alive, not to mention that Microsoft signed a 5 year deal to support OSX with Office. Apple wants iTunes and iPod to be everywhere. The iPod already works great with the Xbox 360. If iTunes shows up on the Xbox 360, it will sell 100 million consoles for that reason alone. That’s 100 million people buying movies from iTunes. That’s just too much business for Apple to turn down.

Any other great conspiracy theories out there? Think I’m crazy? MAKE A COMMENT!